Making warehouse workers function smoothly as part of an integrated order fulfillment and delivery system improves productivity throughout food distribution operations. A common goal of most distributors is to cut the lead time required for customer orders — taking orders later and later in the customer service cycle while still delivering as promised. To make the problem more difficult, add product that comes in daily for delivery as freight instead of sales to customers.
That is precisely the situation faced by Perishable Distributors of Iowa. It is a supermarket and dairy products distributor as well as an LTL freight carrier. PDI was formed in 1982 as a standalone company for fresh meat distribution to stores in the Hy-Vee Food Stores supermarket chain. Hy-Vee is based in Chariton, Iowa, and operates 200 stores in seven states — Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota. It employs roughly 45,000 people, making it the largest single private employer in Iowa. Hy-Vee has sales of more than $3.6 billion annually. The employee-owned company was founded in 1930 by Charles Hyde and David Vredenburg; the corporate name is a contraction of the two founders' names.
Hy-Vee delivers groceries and frozen foods from distribution centers in Chariton in south-central Iowa and from Cherokee in northwest Iowa. PDI is more centrally located in Ankeny, Iowa, a suburb on the northern outskirts of Des Moines.
Separate Name and Fleet
Although distribution to the Hy-Vee stores remains the bulk of PDI business, the company was formed as a separate entity so that it could take on additional distribution business. It has a fleet separate from the supermarket private fleet and a name that doesn't identify it as a part of the chain.
PDI operates from a 370,000 sq ft warehouse originally built on the 60-acre site in 1988. Following its most recent addition in April 2000, the facility boasts 329,000 sq ft of refrigerated and frozen space and 51,000 sq ft of dry storage. The warehouse is served by 54 doors that open to a dock refrigerated to 28° F. A separate 23,000-sq-ft cold storage facility provides additional storage. PDI operates with more than 450 personnel in sales, administration, warehousing, and transportation.
PDI handles roughly 10 million pounds of freight each week. Almost 90% of this belongs to Hy-Vee and is delivered to company stores. The remainder is contract freight picked up from outside shippers or delivered to receivers outside the Hy-Vee family.
Store Orders, LTL Delivery
PDI operates with two distinct classes of freight. The majority is inventory delivered to PDI as an agent for Hy-Vee. This freight, which includes fresh meat, pork, poultry, bakery products, deli items, and frozen seafood, is owned by the company and stocked for order selection in the warehouse. PDI handles roughly 4,000 active skus. This also includes ice cream deliveries for Sunrise Dairy, another Hy-Vee subsidiary acquired in 1991. The company calls its other business contract freight, by which it means freight delivered to PDI by other carriers and freight picked up by PDI for distribution or delivery to other carriers for transportation outside the PDI trade area.
The fleet consists of 68 tractors and 114 trailers. Tractors are matched to tasks with daycabs for routes within easy driving distance of the distribution center and sleepers for longer multi-state runs. Trailers range from 28 ft to 53 ft in length; all are refrigerated. Most are equipped for multi-temp capability, some with two temperature zones and others with three zones of positive temperature control.
Newer trailers are Great Dane Super Seals with air suspension. The vans are 53 ft long and 102 inches wide. PDI began buying 53/102 trailers in 1995 after switching to 48/102s in 1987. A short-lived experiment involved a few 51-ft vans. In each instance, the goal has been to acquire more delivery cube. With average case weight dropping, all distributors are hauling more packaging and less actual freight. The mix of Hy-Vee orders and LTL shipments for outside customers just add to the cube problem experienced by wholesale grocers and supermarket fleets.
Most multi-temp trailers are equipped with Thermo King SB-III 30 TC units with two ceiling-mounted evaporators in the rear compartment. The nose compartment is held at -15° F, and the rear compartment is cooled to 28° F.
380 Weekly Outbound Loads
The fleet runs an average of 380 outbound loads a week and travels an average of 120,000 miles throughout the seven-state trade area. With a combination of multi-stop supermarket loads and deliveries to LTL customers, PDI serves more than 400 customers every week.
Warehouse order selection accuracy and productivity is essential, because the fresh meat, pork, poultry, bakery products, deli items, and frozen seafood stocked by PDI represent the highest value merchandise handled in the Hy-Vee system. Many of the orders must be individually weighed and the value recorded prior to loading.
To accomplish its distribution goals, PDI must be able to reduce its selection errors and reduce the number of shortages per load, says Mark Kloberdanz, PDI's assistant warehouse manager and special projects coordinator. This includes improving the productivity in handling and the accuracy of processing individually weighed orders. A secondary result of reaching these goals would be elimination of printed-paper selection labels. One proposed method for reaching these goals was installation of voice recognition products with the warehouse management system to allow workers to talk to the computer instead of reading pick slips and handling paperwork that usually includes gummed shipping labels.
Can Voice Recognition Work?
Before voice recognition systems are installed in warehouses, a number of questions must be answered. Obviously, the equipment must be tough enough to survive in a warehouse where handling a portable computer is not a worker's foremost responsibility. In addition, most food warehouses require equipment that is compatible with lengthy use in frozen food storage areas. But first and foremost for a system that utilizes speech is whether or not it can work in a noisy environment. Warehouses tend to have two types of noise — a steady background generated by fans and other building equipment and intermittent peaks such as a passing fork truck or a stack of empty pallets being dropped into a pallet dispenser. In addition, the system must be able to discriminate among worker statements. Comments to co-workers and supervisors should not be considered an error by the system.
In addition, workers must be part of the planning. Wholesale grocery and foodservice warehouses are subject to seasonal changes in workforce, and some have relatively high turnover rates. A workforce with high turnover poses a constant training challenge to the employer. In addition, many warehouse workers speak English as a second language.
At PDI the decision was made to install 100 Talkman terminals from Vocollect. Talkman terminals are wireless, wearable voice recognition computers that allow warehouse workers to operate in a hands-free and eyes-free mode. This means that workers are not carrying a clipboard and constantly trying to refocus from reading a pick slip to finding a slot locator on warehouse racking, Kloberdanz says. The terminals are integrated with Vocollect's Pick Manager order selection application to provide a real-time interface to the Talkman terminals. The entire system works with PDI's internal warehouse management system running on an IBM AS400 mainframe computer.
Vocollect is a privately held company that engineers and manufacturers voice recognition computer systems. It was founded in Pittsburgh in 1987.
Wearable Computer
Talkman is a small processor and a headset that includes an earphone and a microphone. The system directs a warehouse worker to a given selection slot. The worker provides voice verification of reaching the correct slot. The system then gives instructions on how much product to select for the current order. The warehouse management system is updated at the same time. Dialog between the worker and the system is simple and direct. The system can operate in multiple languages simultaneously, if required.
Just as handheld scanners were designed to improve productivity and accuracy, voice systems help reduce selection errors and improve picking rates. The work goes faster because workers do not have to slow their activity to read pick slips or apply shipping labels. With no paper to handle, workers are more comfortable and more aware of their surroundings, a situation that improves safety in crowded warehouses.
Implementation of the paperless voice recognition warehouse system is not complete at PDI. Pick sheets have been totally eliminated from the Sunrise Dairy operation, but remain in use for some PDI deliveries. “It's a customer service issue with some receivers,” Kloberdanz says. “Labels remain a comfort factor that the order is correct for some customers.”
Catch Weights Demand Accuracy
Accuracy in selecting high value product is the main justification for implementing the voice recognition system at PDI. In fact, the productivity improvements that come with the system are considered a pleasant, but unintended consequence, Kloberdanz says, a sort of side bar.
Installing the system required some custom programming. For instance, the system had to allow recording the weight of individual packages during the selection process. Since the building was not originally constructed for a wireless warehouse management system, care had to be taken to avoid breaks in the RF coverage. On the software side of the equation, the Vocollect system had to integrate with PDI's existing labor management system and its AS400 warehouse management program.
One of the more interesting parts of the installation was defining the dialog between workers and the computer. The system does not require use of a prepackaged set of commands and responses. PDI was able to specify what the computer would say to workers and how workers would respond. The final step in installation was training the operators.
Installation was not without bumps in the road, Kloberdanz says. About five weeks into the program, a glitch was discovered in the AS400 interface. PDI had to back up and fine-tune the dialog between workers and the system.
The results have been impressive, he says. At the beginning of the process, the selection error rate at PDI was 110 per 100,000 cases selected, or roughly one-tenth of one percent. QThree months into the implementation process, order selectors using the Talkman terminals were making only 12.5 errors per 100,000 cases selected, an 88.5% reduction in errors. Order selection accuracy reached 99.99%.
The bonus in the whole process was an increase of 17.5% in worker productivity, Kloberdanz says. Before implementing the voice recognition system, order selectors in the Sunrise Dairy department were picking 190 cases per hour. After Talkman installation was complete, the selection rate jumped to 230 cases per selector per hour.
